Opening up with storage

Its open storage stack is clearly the fastest growing one even in face of competition from the likes of EMC and Network Appliance and amidst media reports on how Sun is grappling with challenges like the gap between millions of developer downloads and the follow-on service and hardware sales. Sun it seems is trying its best to reach new horizons while walking on Amber Roads.

Sivasankaran, director, Storage Practice, Sun Microsystems India talks to Pratima Harigunani of CyberMedia News on the new storage line code-named Amber Road and various aspects of the evolving storage market right from open source to new storage formats to the impact on business strategies.

What are the highlights of the change that the industry is experiencing with reference to open storage? There is a major shift occurring in the storage marketplace-- perhaps one of the biggest ever -- that will change how people buy storage.

Similar to the server/Linux movement a decade ago, the storage industry is going through a similar shift -- open source software on industry standard hardware that will transform the $40billion proprietary storage market.

Could you give an overview of Sun Storage 7000 line in the context of open storage developments?

The Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems is a great product in terms of innovation and it comes out of open storage initiative where any storage array will follow community-available hardware and software instead of proprietary hardware, processor or systems.

We see a wave coming and want to ride it. It is similar to what happened to server some years back. The underlying technologies for the Open Storage strategy is made possible through open source technologies such as ZFS, an open source file system that has become very popular, and FISH works, a software layer built into these systems that enables compatibility, modularity, management. They have been in development at Sun for nearly a decade.

This is an open storage appliance that will enable Sun to further magnetize on Open Storage strategy and help Sun further accelerate its position in storage, and provide a solution for customers, most of whom are still needing to increase their storage requirements regardless of the economic environment, which is crucial in light of expensive, complex proprietary storage options.

How do you view the market's evolution from tapes and other permanent storage formats to disks and to the new-age storage formats?

The market is evolving in multiple ways. The customers are also trying to understand how and where to store data. He in fact asks, can you help in strategizing storage as per structured and unstructured data? Out of the total capacity today, 20 per cent falls in structured category while 80 per cent belongs to the unstructured bucket, which consists of Power Points, Emails, Images, Audio-Visual files, documents etc.

The customer is interested in knowing a better way for structured data with cost objectives in mind. There is automatic migration possible from one storage environment to another. One can explore SAN (Storage Area Network) and Tape environments as per costs, space and business-criticality of requirements. The high-end environments can be used for critical data; open storage can be applied for tier-2 or -3 environments while tape still works well for back up and archives.

What impact are technological updates like Dynamic Capacity Management, Thin Provisioning and Virtualization making?

Thin Provisioning has been around for quite some time. High-end enterprises can manage huge disk volumes smartly by allowing less number of physical disks but a big number on capacity metrics with the help of new techniques. Customers are also surely looking at storage virtualization investments.

In the context of the current market dynamics how much is happening on restructured business lines or merging of storage and server lines?

Our expansion strategy does not replace any traditional market significantly. We will go to NAS (Network Attached Storage) market and are looking at ease-of-use, built-in UI and other compelling features as well as competitive TCO deliverables as we move on. Sun has already been growing its storage business – 29 per cent globally according to latest IDC tracker.

In India, as per IDC, Sun has earned the No. 1 spot in the India external storage market. Sun Microsystems garnered 22 per cent market share in customer revenue terms for the period Q2 CY 2008 (April-June). The India External Storage market grew 48 per cent year-on-year (Q2 2008 over Q2 2007) in customer revenue terms, whereas Sun's market share in the India External Storage market grew 103 per cent during the same period.